Here we go again. Just one year after the Colorado Supreme Court reversed a lower-court ruling that would have required the legislature to come up with a king’s ransom of new revenue to fund schools, another such lawsuit is in the works.

And this one, frankly, looks as if it might have a lot more going for it.

As the Daily Camera reported last week, Boulder lawyer Kathy Gebhardt — the lead attorney in the Lobato vs. Colorado lawsuit that crashed and burned last year — is preparing another suit challenging the current funding level for public schools. And it could be filed in early summer, the Camera adds.

Unlike with Lobato, however, this time the plaintiffs won’t attempt to subvert the democratic process and separation of powers by claiming judges know better than lawmakers how much funding schools deserve. Quite the opposite. Plaintiffs will likely claim the legislature itself undermined self-government by refusing to fund schools to the level voters mandated in Amendment 23.

And you know what? They may have a point.

We’ll want to see briefs from both sides before reaching firm conclusions, but the broad facts are these: Fourteen years ago voters approved an amendment that was supposed to boost K-12 funding by inflation plus 1 percent for 10 years, and then by no less than inflation in years after that. But when the bottom fell out of the economy in the last recession, the legislature and Gov. Bill Ritter cut school funding (along with much else) in order to avoid savage reductions to some programs.

They also contrived a complicated legal rationale involving per-pupil funding that glazes the eyes and which no doubt the state stands by to this day. But did it meet the letter of Amendment 23, never mind the spirit?

I wrote at the time that I doubted it, and still do. Elected officials were attempting to spread around the pain of budget cuts, which is laudable. But Amendment 23 stipulates that education should be spared any such pain forevermore. It’s a stupendously irresponsible mandate and speaks to the reckless folly of its sponsors, all of whom skated away with no professional repercussions.

Like it or not, however, voters drank the Kool-Aid and the measure is in the constitution. And it shouldn’t be finessed.

So why didn’t Amendment 23’s sponsors and the education establishment raise the roof back in 2009?

Why wait until now to sue?

In part because the falloff in state revenue in ’09 truly was dire and they didn’t want to appear unreasonable and selfish. And in part because they didn’t want to embarrass fellow Democrats. Had a Republican governor proposed the education cuts, all hell would have erupted.

Lobato took years to resolve, and this lawsuit will take time, too. But if plaintiffs succeed, it will rock the Capitol. Lawmakers may have to strip down other programs, beginning with higher education, and perhaps go to voters for a tax hike, too.

Still, a victory for plaintiffs would not be as destructive to the budget as the Lobato case threatened to be. In that instance, plaintiffs wanted the courts to order billions of dollars in remedies under a subjective and shifting standard of need. Here a judge presumably would enforce a funding formula extracted from Amendment 23 that couldn’t simply be invented.

And in one sense, a plaintiffs’ victory might be quite instructive. Putting school finance — or other funding formulas — into the constitution is an atrocious idea. And maybe voters would begin to believe those who say so.

E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter @vcarrollDP